I Call That a Bargain...
The Lower East Side
I stood in a shop longer than it was wide, especially with clothing flanking us right and left on waist- and eye-level racks, crammed in so tightly that we could not discern what lay beneath the plastic sheaths that protected each piece from dust, flickery fluorescent light, and our greasy paws. Like the rods holding the wares, we felt the weight of the humid, motionless air. I was 21, and my Aunt Pearl — zaftig, matronly, stylish — pointed a determined finger like a divining rod, issuing orders at and towering over the short, sweaty, yarmulked proprietor.
Aunt Pearl had brought my mother and me to the Lower East Side – when it was the Lower East Side, and not yet another gentrified enclave – to shop for work suits. Pearl, whose shellacked beehive of tresses the color of her name could withstand a category three hurricane, refused to pay retail for clothes, and confided, behind a gloved hand close to my ear, as if 007 himself craved this covert information, “I know a guy.”
Pearl was tickled by my small size and had expressed, not a few times, that “I don’t believe anyone actually fits into a size two! I must see this with my own eyes!” She selected several Herve´ Bernard suits for me. The owner pushed me to the back of the store and grumbled, “Here — try on,” in a Yiddish accent. A dressing room would have wasted precious space, so my aunt and mother stood guard as I slipped the skirts over my clothes, rolled down my jeans, and put the jackets on over the blouse Pearl had selected for me.
I tried on about two dozen and chose two: one in crisp, nubby, neutral linen, the other in classic navy serge. Both came equipped with running back shoulder pads. “How much are…” I began, but Pearl put a finger to my lips before I could finish the sentence. No price tags dangled from any of the armless, plastic-draped sleeves. I felt like a woman on a first date in an old-time restaurant, where the waiters would give the “weaker sex” menus sans prices. How would I know if my budget allowed these purchases? Pearl jumped into action before I could ask.
With the tactical stealth of a Navy Seal, she laid the suits on the cloudy glass counter, next to the hefty push-button cash register. She spoke in hushed tones, her head bowed. I could see the man shrug and shake his head. The exchange had the gravitas and tension of a Mideast peace talk. Suddenly, Pearl put an indignant nose in the air, left the goods on the sooty surface, took me by the hand, and marched toward the door, my mother in tow.
“No, no, wait!” crowed the proprietor just as my aunt’s sensible pump crossed the threshold. More negotiations ensued, and soon we were back out in the sunlight with two new suits. I never found out what they cost; my mother gifted them to me to mark the beginning of my career at Metropolitan Life as a management trainee. But the price was no doubt less than the proprietor had named originally. My aunt couldn’t have been prouder. Not so much of me, but of her own artful deal making.
She came, she saw, she conquered.
Mecca
When my mother deplaned in the small Westchester airport – her last flight, as it turned out – she wore a red winter anorak with faux fur trim around the hood. I recognized it before I recognized her; she had grown gaunt and pale. We had bought that coat at Marshall's together.
“I don’t need one down in Florida, of course, but I will need one when I come back to visit you and Suzanne and the kids,” she explained as she tried on a few right in the aisle. At the time, she wore an ugly, ill-fitting teal-colored coat that she’d had for decades. I’d convinced her to come to our favorite shopping spot to look for a new one.
The pang I felt when I saw it walk out of the gate area squeezed my heart and made it hard to breathe. Her myelodysplasia had turned into full-blown leukemia, and although we would go through the motions of seeking additional treatment options, we all knew that the end was near. She died six weeks after I picked her up that day.
I grew up in a comfortable middle-class home. We wanted for nothing, but certainly did not live extravagantly. My grandparents — one a set of Greek immigrants, the other children of Russian immigrants — lived through the depression, and lost family members to the Holocaust. They were a conservative, frugal bunch and passed along that ethos to my parents. When we dined out – or really ate out; what we did wasn’t dining – my father made it abundantly clear that we could order anything on the menu… from the lower-priced quadrant. He shopped at discount stores (Ross Dress for Less was his favorite) for both work outfits and his standard weekend wear: an endless array of what seemed to me to be the same plaid flannel shirt. The deeper the discount, the better.
My mom took me to Daffy Dan’s for new school clothes, where many of the items were not only discounted, but “irregular” — a euphemism for torn or in some other way defective. We bonded over shopping. We graduated to the tonier Marshall’s, where we would venture together to wander the aisles for bargains and serve as each other’s personal stylist when we donned our finds in the poorly constructed and harshly lit dressing rooms. We would acknowledge that “A bargain isn’t a bargain” if we never wore it (how many things have ended up in the Goodwill bin because, well, I just never found a place to wear that $3 gold lame tube top?). But we revelled in our successes like conquering Vikings.
During our last outing there, she shuffled slowly through the aisles, disinterested in the articles of clothing that she fingered. I felt like the visit could bring us some sense of normalcy, a normalcy that might render the inevitable untrue. Always more interested in me than in herself, she lit up a bit when I pulled out a lavender Free People puffer jacket. “Mom! Look at this. Originally $200, and it’s got a yellow tag - $13!!!” I put it on and twirled around. It was oversized and warm and fit like a hug. Her eyes widened, she smiled, and we stowed it conspiratorially in our cart lest anyone else espy it. Yet again, a coat united us again amidst the other shoppers, who I bitterly suspected were not shopping with their mothers for the last time. That coat still hugs me in her stead.
Paris
Some people travel for the express purpose of shopping. As a kid, friends would “go into the city” just to shop. As an adult, certain friends do the same in Paris… but that’s not why I found myself there a few years back with my oldest son.
Physically incapable of buying a pair of jeans at full price in the Gap, I was hardly going to make it rain on the Champs-Elysees. Dustin, eschews shopping except for strictly utilitarian purposes, and then he does it with military precision. Get in, get what you need, get out.
No, we visited Paris to drink in the sights and the red wine. (We did linger at the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop, but book shopping is another essay entirely.) Before we left England for the City of Light via the Chunnel train from St. Pancras, Randy, my college roommate, BFF and financial advisor, implored me to spend some Euros on myself. I promised her I’d try. Thanks to an abundance of Marriott Bonvoy points collected over the years, we stayed at the impossibly luxurious Prince de Galles Hotel, steps from the Champs-Elysees, which we traversed en route to Notre Dame, the Louvre, Montmartre, and the Eiffel Tower.
Each day we saw hordes of customers queued at the entrance to the Louis Vuitton flagship store waiting to be the first in to spend obscene amounts of money on LV-embossed trinkets. Ne rien de tout in those gigantic windows even tempted me, but something just down the street did.
A pair of black buttery leather, subtly studded mules in the unassuming window of The Kooples on the Avenue George V called to me morning and evening as we passed. “Go in and look at them,” Dustin urged. Some combination of a reluctance to treat myself and intimidation kept me on the pavement, until Randy’s voice joined Dustin’s and pushed me through the door.
My French had very adequately carried us through the city, and I felt certain that the sales associates spoke English. I didn’t want to leave France and regret leaving the shoes behind.
“Bonjour,” I ventured timidly, and explained, in faltering French, that I’d like to try on Cinderella’s slippers in the window. The young woman, charmed I’m sure more by Dustin’s good looks than my fabulous French, could not have been sweeter. My Prince Charming might not have manifested, but I did leave feeling like a princess with those shoes in a bag and a smile on my face.
Several years later, they have only left their protective felt bag and hit the pavement a handful of times.
Virtually Shopping
Shopping has evolved dramatically since the first retail stall appeared thousands of years ago. In ancient Greece, citizens gathered in the agora to catch up on news, discuss politics and religion, and… shop. The word in Greek translates to “gathering place,” but has evolved to mean market. Just as in Medieval, Middle Age, and Early Modern market towns, citizens came not only to shop, but to connect, commiserate, and communicate. It took an effort to go to market squares in towns like Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds, but the visit resulted not only in the acquisition of goods, but in important community-building social interaction.
Malls, department stores, and big box stores, consolidated the retail experience with, literally, one-stop shopping. I wonder if archeologists will unearth shopping malls millennia from now and conclude that these behemoths were places of worship, amusement parks, or both.
The modern internet agora has nearly erased the raison d’etre of the ancient agora. We shop in isolated silence. We don’t haggle. We don’t hold, touch, or taste the goods as we mull over them. We scroll through merchandise and find it far too easy to succumb to temptation and push “complete purchase.”
The advent of online superstores, mutated, Hulk-like, by the pandemic, has dramatically changed our shopping habits. Study after study shows how shopping tickles our pleasure centers*, which can lead, like other feel-good activities, down dangerous lanes. Etail has made this drug of choice readily available. We no longer need to go to the market; the market comes to us, 24/7.
I don’t think of myself as a lazy person, but of late, the soft steel-gray velvet of my couch has become way too intimately familiar with my bottom. Covid has kept me in and on it more than I’d like. I have watched every movie, every special, every episode of every current show on Netflix, Hulu, HBOMax, and Amazon Prime. I knit. I needlepoint. I clean my house so much that it resents me not giving it a chance to get dirty. I sit in my office-cum-Shakespeare shrine and write. I play round after round of Words with Friends, Mahjong Match, Solitaire, Wordle, and Block Sudoko on my iPhone. But at some point, earlier in the day than I prefer to admit, I surrender to the siren song of shopping sites.
Browsing from the comfort of my couch is not only safe and convenient, but it passes time, amuses me, and allows for the promise of a present — from bored me now to bored me later. My scrolling falls into two categories; first, the practical. I use Amazon (I’m sorry to admit) for things I need, for which I’d rather not venture to a brick-and-mortar store. Toilet paper sits happily stockpiled. Motion-sensor night lights prevent trips on my nocturnal bathroom trips. Organic hemp seeds find their way into my smoothies. If this were reading material, it would be The New York Times: All the stuff that’s fit to buy.
Then, the impractical. If this were reading material, it would be Vogue. Sites like Nordstrom Rack and Rue La La fall into this category. I do not need another pair of shoes, item of clothing, or scarf. But these sites (especially if they feed into my thrill of the chase for a bargain) tempt me with pretty things that might make me feel good about how I look if I ever have the occasion to dress like an adult and go out again. I get an adrenaline rush every time I see the package on the doorstep, even if I sent it to myself.
While not addicted to shopping, I am slightly obsessed with Doc Martens boots: I own eight pairs. Their crafty designers dissolve my resolve not to buy any more each year by debuting new styles to tempt me. These sites have clearly embedded sensors into my brain – I need think only fleetingly of how badly I need a new pair of “Docs” before they pop magically into my feed, as the tartan pair did one night recently. Nordstrom Rack graciously let me know that the tantalizing pair was not only available in my size, but that the price had been reduced. I momentarily lost my mind and my resolve, not resist and clicked “buy” before the angel on my right shoulder could estop the devil on my left.
I know I must exercise much more caution online because it is just too tempting to spend money I needn’t on things I needn’t. This could become addictive quickly, but fortunately for me, my reluctance to spend money – especially at full retail – on myself stops me from slipping into shopaholism. Also, Ecommerce facilitates returns, so I can repent for my retail sins with a simple visit to the UPS store.
…Til I Drop
For me, shopping still fulfills certain needs that run from the sublime to the ridiculous. I wander those same Marshall’s aisles alone now, because they just have everything for less, from the men’s Spyder tank undershirts that I wear under everything in the winter, to iPhone charger cords and Isotoner slippers and gloves. But I go as much for nostalgia as anything.
I often stop in my tracks and choke up when I glimpse a woman of around the age my mother was when she died at 77, in a jacket like one she’d wear, with her short haircut perusing the racks. I feel her presence as surely as I do when I see a hawk persistently circling overhead or have a monarch butterfly follow me down the beach. To this day I find it heretical to shop full retail — to overlook a savory bargain.
*
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-love/201112/ladies-love-shop-i-know-why
https://psychologenie.com/why-do-girls-love-shopping-so-much